Steven Joyce doesn't understand irony #SJDU

This is the second blog in what is now an occasional series, that we’ve decided to call ‘Steven Joyce doesn’t understand…’. After writing Wednesday’s blog called ‘Steven Joyce doesn’t understand economics’ it swiftly became uncomfortably obvious that we’d get enough material to turn it into a series.

Today’s is called ‘Steven Joyce doesn’t understand irony’. We were going to call it ‘Steven Joyce doesn’t understand democracy’ but we’re pretty certain that ‘Big J’ is going to give us plenty of opportunity to come back to that one.

Anyway, back to today’s edition of SJDU. The whole ‘not understanding irony’ thing has been done before. Most notably about how the well-known ditty called Ironic by songstress Alanis Morissette completely misunderstands irony. Which is ironic.

What isn’t ironic is a whole range of many different New Zealanders, some of them well-known, some of them not, backing a campaign lambasting the government’s plans for deep sea oil drilling and cracking down on peaceful protests.

The minister for telling-simon-bridges-what-to-do thought this was ironic though. Apparently being concerned about democracy, the future of our country, and wanting it to be prosperous, and clean becomes ironic depending on a mode of transport you may or may not have used.

Steven mate, that’s not even close to irony. It would be ironic if, say, you backed a campaign against oars, and your business was selling some kind of oar-substitute, and you won the world oar-substitute selling prize and on your way across the ocean to collect your prize your oar-substitute driven boat broke down and you had to get a ride to the oar-substitute awards on a boat powered by oars. That would be ironic.

The reason why we still need fossil fuels to power our modes of transport is because politicians like you are failing to show the leadership and vision needed to move us to cleaner, smarter ways of powering our transport. Your failure to understand this, while attempting to bandy around the term ‘ironic’ is, well, it’s ironic.

Minister-for-telling-simon-bridges-what-to-do isn’t really Steven’s job title. It’s actually minister for economic development. And, while Steven might think that having a minister for economic development back foreign oil companies to come over here and drill in our waters, with all the multi-billion dollar risk that brings – for us, and our economy, not the oil company – at the expense of backing Kiwi clean tech businesses that could bring tens of thousands of jobs and boost the economy by billions of bucks might be ironic, it isn’t. That’s called hypocrisy, Steven.

See you next time for #SJDU… And let us know in the comment box below what you reckon we should cover next in the series.